Then I read Nick Hornby’s A Long Way Down. I keep seeing recommendations for Hornby’s books, and this is the first I’ve read. It was engaging, clever, and has a resolution you feel satisfied with. And you can read it quickly. The characters are recognizable – and since the point of view gets passed to each of them, you can identify somewhat with them all, although I’m probably most like the dowdy Maureen, unfortunately. It’s the story of 4 down in the mouth strangers who meet on the roof of an apartment building to commit suicide on New Year’s Eve. None of them can do something so private with an audience, so they head downstairs and go to a party. Unintentionally, over a period of three months, they end up helping each other find a purpose to live, or at least to work through their current dark spots. There were some good lines and memorable scenes, but not a book you’d go back and read again, unless you were bored or were having a conversation with someone about it. It actually would make a better book club book.
Then one night I started in on Lolita. This is not a book that should be read quickly, but I didn’t actually mean to reread it. I had picked up the Library of America collection of Nabokov’s novels from the 1955-1962 because I wanted to read Pnin, another regularly recommended book, but Lolita was the first novel included in the collection. I remember reading it originally while sitting between the stacks in college, supposedly reading something for a paper, but sneaking this in. But I couldn’t remember the ending. Embarrassing, but a talent that allows me to reread with greater pleasure. I had meant to reread it after reading Reading Lolita in Tehran some time ago, but never got around to it, and really wasn’t sure I wanted to because the book makes you feel so uncomfortable, like you need to hide it behind the covers of another book or hide yourself while you read. Which I did. I just meant to read the last couple of chapters to refresh my memory. But it is an artfully told tale, and I couldn’t stop flipping forward a few more pages and then a few more. I finally returned to the beginning after getting about halfway backwards. Fascinating, revolting, enchanting – like Nabokov really did incant some spell while writing it. That it was his first book in English is astounding – the lyrical language confounds the horror of the content.
The afterward, in which Nabokov describes the development of the book, raises the issue of whether the book was “lewd” or not. He says the techniques he used in the beginning “misled” some readers into thinking it was going to follow a pattern of successive erotic scenes, and he assumes that many of his initial readers for publication didn’t finish the book and thought the theme one of three untouchable taboos, the other two being interracial marriage and the good atheist. That comment dates the book.
Also interesting: “For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm” . . . “It is childish to study a work of fiction in order to gain information about a country or about a social class or about the author.”
So to read and write for “aesthetic bliss” – an elevated sort of pleasure, a state of enlightenment – is his goal. Sounds zen-like. But that quote dovetails into the idea of reading as sacramental – a vehicle for encountering beauty that makes you aware of the possibility of transcendence – of God. The first two books I read won’t get you there, although to its credit A Long Way Down addresses the idea of God and of connecting with others to make life worth living. But Lolita does leave you in a state of altered consciousness.
He closes with this:
“My private tragedy, which cannot, and indeed should not, be anybody’s concern, is that I had to abandon my natural idiom, my untrammeled, rich, and infinitely docile Russian tongue for a second-rate brand of English, devoid of any of those apparatuses – the baffling mirror, the black velvet backdrop, the implied associations and traditions – which the native illusionist, frac-tails flying, can magically use to transcend the heritage in his own way.”Imagine if he had written in Russian. But maybe the alien language of creation creates a more intriguing, alienated character.
It is obvious that the “best” book of the three is Lolita. At some point as a preteen, I remember thinking what made one book better than another? I loved everything I read. Which is, I suppose, why I ended up majoring in a great books program. But the question is, do you ignore content because of the artistry of the creation? It is another one of those books that have become cultural icons, but are monuments to a sort of nihilism, or a religion in which art is God.
